My name is Will Ludwigsen, and I’ve been publishing fiction and essays for over twenty years. My stories have appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. My first collection In Search Of and Others received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus as well as a Shirley Jackson Award nomination.
I’m a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and I have an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. I taught undergraduate courses in writing science fiction and horror for half a decade.
Before you think I’m bragging, let me add one more bit of information:
My entire reading fanbase could probably fit on a single bus like the Muppets.
It would be an awesome bus, don’t get me wrong. There’d be a lot of conversation about UFOs, ghosts, missing people, serial killers, Boy Scouting, vintage computers, Edgar Allan Poe, D.B. Cooper, time travel, and shambling architecture.
But — and I say this without bitterness — I’m the kind of writer we don’t talk much about when we’re giving advice on how to “make it.” We talk about starting out and finding a voice and making a submission plan to all the best markets, but we don’t talk about how to continue and persist in creating our work when we hit a few baseline singles instead of a homerun for our first try.
This site is my attempt to change that. You could call it a writing guide for tired people, or an advice column for stalled careers, or a retreat to replenish whatever fuel makes you create in the first place.
I call it “Might as Well Write” because, even in the darkest moments of a confusing career when I’ve been tempted to give it up, I hear this voice that says:
This is a site for people who are adjusting their expectations from fame and wealth to something far better: the freedom to create what truly matters to us.